


Recruitment

by imsfire



Series: Rogue One Anniversary prompts [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, Child Soldiers, Draven is near the beginning of his journey into being the cold man we all know, Draven is not a dick, Fest is a spaceSpanish planet, Regret, Sadness, a Lieutenant with the rebels recruits a boy on Fest, only a man who has been through many years of living hell, rated for descriptions of blood and off-stage violence, rating is precautionary as not too graphic but nasty to think about, when Davits Draven met Cassian Andor, written for the Rogue One anniversary prompt "Favourite character"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-13 01:57:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12973215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: He has very bright dark eyes, this child, looking up at Dav from that babyish face; but the adolescent creaking in his voice suggests he’s older than he looks, perhaps eleven or twelve.And oh, how they could use a kid like him…





	Recruitment

Dav hunkers down as another explosion rocks the structure at the end of the alley.  Poor bloody bastards, they must have had a decent ammo store.  Well, that’s his recruitment mission shot for shit, then.

It should have been such a good source of people, too.  This mission had looked like repaying his time threefold, with intel and new recruits and supply deals, up until tonight and this.  Chaos and ruin; a battalion of Stormtroopers surrounding the main base of operations of the cell, pouring out gunfire, giving no quarter to the desperate survivors who managed to struggle out of the warren of alleys and the building they surrounded.  Which had just been detonated, blown into the bleak evening sky.

Pretty much every soul he’s met in the past week is now lying dead, either buried under the rubble or sprawled in the blaster-ridden street, in snow that was once grey but is now the colour of blood.  And if he hadn’t gone back to the ship to pick up a spare datapad he would have been dead alongside them.

Damn, damn, damn.

Poor bloody bastards, mown down like sky-corn.

There’s no point in staying here now, though, he’ll just risk drawing attention to himself if he does.  He can’t help the dead.  If he lingers to scatter just one of their bodies with a handful of dirt and say a prayer over them it won’t bring an iota of good to their cause or their dreams of freedom.  They’ll still have lost every hope they ever lived for.  Rank sentiment to feel someone should show respect for the dead, he should have set that aside years ago.  The dead are dead.

He imagines Colonel Cracken’s distaste if his superior officer could hear his thoughts.  Prayers, funerary rites?  _Wake up, kiddo, we’re in a fucking war here, an undeclared, unwearying, goddammed war that will never be ended by good intentions or cherished customs and kindnesses, and respect for the fucking dead._

The bombardment seems to have stopped and there are fewer troops visible already.  They’re moving through the wreckage, picking off anyone still alive; he hears an occasional single shot, the kind of neat point-blank fire that eliminates the need to take prisoners.  A wait, for the mopping-up to be over, and he can at least count the bodies, report back on the casualties here.  One less Separatist group that will never find its way to allying with the rebellion.

He peers over the wall.  The sight of the fallen men and women lying in their blood is wrenching, and he curses himself harshly into calm.  Report their deaths and serve the cause they died for; or rather, your own cause, that could have marched alongside theirs, given a chance.

_Pull yourself together, man._

It’s a milder night than usual, the spring sky overcast, the blood still wet on the ground.  Wet, and pooling, the churned-up slushy snow thawed in places by the body heat of the dead. 

A wriggle of movement catches his eye suddenly; the tiniest ghost of motion, he would have missed it altogether if he hadn’t been staring transfixed at the horror of the street.  In the gutter – _in the blood in the gutter_ – worming slowly and carefully backwards towards the low brick arch of a culvert, with his gaze still locked on the last ‘troopers inspecting the destruction – is a child.

Dark hair; dark clothes that wrinkle and bag around him, ill-fitting on a skinny frame; and when the kid glances round at the dark archway Dav sees a face that is thin and shadowed yet still has the round cheeks of neoteny.  Nine, maybe ten years old?

There’s a glimpse of something pale in the shadows of the culvert; he squints, just as it moves forward and resolves into another face peering out.  A second kid, slightly older, a glare of rage and grief crouching in hiding while the smaller child does the reconnaissance. 

The child crawling in blood; he looks almost feverishly calm. 

The boy in the culvert is familiar; Annio, Dav thinks after a moment.  Geferel’s son.  Geferel, the cell’s charismatic but impulsive commander, is one of the dead women and men lying in the street.

He’s never seen the other kid before.

He watches as the child creeps backwards into the drain and slithers down; sees him pushing away the older boy’s grabbing hands, hushing a garbled question coolly as they both crouch in the darkness.

It’s another half hour before the coast is definitely clear, and he gives it as long again before venturing out of his safe corner tucked behind the low wall around a garbage store.  His path to the drain arch takes him past one of the bodies, a girl of 17 or 18 whose head has been blown half-off by close-range fire.  That kid slid right past her; probably has her blood on his clothes now.  Dav hesitates a second before pausing to scoop up a handful of the bloody gravel and slush, casting it over her remains.  He doesn’t stay long enough to recite even a line of prayer, but the words echo in his mind just the same, spinning like a sick melody alongside a cynical inner reminder of how worthless they are.  

He crouches low and hurries to the spot where the two children vanished. 

He checks the street one more time, but there’s no sign of the enemy in the gathering dark.  They struck hard and thorough, took no prisoners, and left no part of the cell’s HQ standing; but now they’ve gone and it’s started to snow again.  The temperature is falling fast and the blood that hasn’t trickled away into the drains is beginning to freeze.  Red ice forms on the grey snow.

If those children have nowhere to go better than this, will they even last till morning?

Dav crouches, blaster in hand, and peers inside the culvert.

There’s nothing for a moment; darkness, silence.  Then with a sudden rustle and a current of stinking air the older boy materialises, waving a vibroblade, launching himself with a face contorted in fear and rage.  Dav flinches, ancient instinct holding him back from killing a child; and in the split second before he can master himself and bring his weapon to bear, a shadow hurls itself out of the dark on top of Annio.

The two boys tussle for a moment, Annio gasping and cursing and the other spitting in a harsh half-broken voice “¡Déjalo, deja!” 

The fight resolves into Annio on the floor of the drain, knee deep in filth, and the younger kid standing over him, with the knife in his hand.  “¡Idiota que eres, bájate!” he says furiously.

“¡Hijo de –“

“¡Y cállate!  Pendejo, ¿no reconoces a ese cabrón?  Es el republicano.  Con tu madre, ¿no t’acuerdas?  ¡Idiota!”  He flings the blade down in the mess of blood and waste; turns to Dav.  “What do you do here?  His mother is dead.  All dead, only us left.”  His Basic is accented but good.

“I know,” Dav says.  “I can get you off-planet.  If you want.  I thought you might need help.”  Bracing himself on the archway he clambers down into the darkness to join them.  It’s too low to stand upright, and the floor of the drain squelches under his boots.

“No help,” Annio hisses, pulling himself upright.  “¡Hijo de puta Republicano!” He spits pointlessly into the dirt.  “You’re Alliance.  Alliance to restore the Republic.  We don’t want the fucking Republic, that’s what we are fighting against!”  He adds something fast and guttural to the younger boy, in a Festi so slangy as to be incomprehensible.  Then “Leave us alone!  We will go to Ore City, there’s a cadre there.  We will join with them.”

 _Not exactly heading for a career in Intelligence, are you, boy?_   Dav sighs.  “Ore City is a two day journey by speeder; a week away on foot.  And your mother didn’t think much of the cell there.  Force grant her rest,” he adds, because sweet stars, the woman is lying dead not twenty metres away.  “I know the Festan resistance started as a Separatist movement but realists like Geferel have recognized that the Republic isn’t your enemy anymore now.  It barely even exists except in name; it’s a tyranny, one man’s fiefdom; in all but name, an Empire.  You seem like smart lads –“ _well, one of you does, anyway_ –“ you must have noticed things changing.  The men you fight – the way they fight…”

The skinny kid is already nodding.  Reluctantly Annio does too.  “They shoot faster,” he says.  “No more bull-horn, no more _Stand down your protest_ – they just shoot at us.”

Dav gives him a nod.  It’s a fair observation.  He turns his eyes to the other boy, tilting his head on one side as if to say _Anything else_?

Gets a curt nod in reply, as adult as his own.  “Different tactics.  Different uniforms, better weapons and more of them.  Different formations and dispositions.  The curfews are used differently too, not to keep peace anymore – to justify punishing.  And they made everyone take an oath of citizenship.  But they said we are all citizens anyway.  So why make them swear it at gunpoint?”

And that is more than an observation.  It’s a report.  With analysis.

“Did you two swear?”

Annio shakes his head. “Mother hid me.   _He_ did though.”  For a moment, looking at his companion, his eyes are venomous. 

The second boy draws himself up.  “I did not!”

They glare at one another.  Dav prompts the lad quickly “Go on.”

“I _didn’t_.  I’m too young.  They said I was, not me.  The ‘troopers said.  They told me to go.  But I stayed to watch.  I listened.  Nobody saw me, nobody cares about kids like us.  I wanted to know what happened.  What they made people say.”

 _Oh, we could use a kid like you_ …  “And?”

“It was a – a bad oath.  Bad words –“ for the first time his excellent Basic falters, as though the recollection hampers his speech.  “Bad words and with – violence.  If I _had_ sworn I would want to undo it, that oath.”  He has very bright dark eyes, this child, looking up at Dav from that babyish face; but the adolescent creaking in his voice suggests he’s older than he looks, perhaps eleven or twelve.  “I want my promises to be clean.”

There’s a silence for a moment, at the emphatic innocence of those words and their honour.

“There’s a place for you both with the Alliance,” Dav says.  “You’d be safe, have enough to eat.  We have weapons, we’d train you.  A chance to fight, help make a real difference.  Avenge your families.”  It’s the most truncated recruitment spiel imaginable, murmured in the stinking dark to these two kids because anything, surely, even this, is better than leaving them to Force-knows what horrors here on occupied Fest.

“Come with me!” says Annio urgently.  “Ore City.  ¡Ven conmigo!”

“Vete a la Ciudad, Annio.  Estarás seguro ahí.”

“¡Ven conmigo, Cassian!”

“¡Tú, ven conmigo!”

Annio frowns, bewildered and bitter. “¿Luchar con ellos?  ¿Con la República?  No, jamás.  No puedo.”

They stare at one another with the mutual blank pitying incomprehension of the idealist and the pragmatist.

Or, if not wholly a pragmatist, soon to be one.  _I can make him, we can make him, one._

Cassian crouches down for a moment, running his left hand through the bloody filth at his feet; he straightens holding Annio’s vibroblade and shakes the muck from it; closes it up and offers it back to the older boy.  “Que la Fuerza te acompañe.”

“No te entiendo, no entiendo porque, porque haces –“ Annio’s face is stricken suddenly, all the animosity vanishing as it dawns on him he’s alone.  “Cassian, ¡por favor, no!”

“Buena suerte, Annio.  Que vayas con esperanza.”

He half expects them to embrace, after the heat of their argument; but they just stare, until finally Annio swallows and nods his head once, and steps back, his fist tightening on the dirty knife handle.

“If you change your mind,” Dav says into the dark as he vanishes “ask at Stone Corner Spaceport for Darvo Dreckan’s ship.  I won’t be leaving for an hour or two yet.”

There’s no reply.

When he turns round, the boy Cassian is already hoisting himself out of the drain, scanning the ruins almost casually for hostiles.  He glances back saying “It’s clear.  We need to move, señor.”

There it is, that cracked note in his larynx again.  A boy whose voice is just starting to break. 

_A child.  I’ve recruited a child._

He’s recruited a realist; saved a child.

_I should have tried harder to save them both.  What are Annio’s chances of reaching Ore City, alone, in the middle of a clamp-down?_

And yet –

Better one willing recruit than two who don’t want to be there

Better one life saved than both of them lost

Better a child soldier than yet another dead child

 _I’ve done what I can, I’ve done **all** that I can, and we need to move_…

He holsters the blaster and braces himself on the lip of the culvert, swings up and out, into the bloody street.   “Let’s go, Cassian.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to tumblr user chaemerionwrites for helping to lick my rusty Spanish into shape!


End file.
